Free Unfinished Portrait by Anthea Fraser Page A

for it. Anyway, there were heated exchanges, and when Chloë died, they’d not spoken for several weeks. Elspeth blamed herself for her unreasonable behaviour, and for not being there for Chloë.’
    â€˜Who was this man?’ Rona asked after a moment.
    â€˜Yet another artist. Nathan Tait.’
    â€˜Nathan Tait?’ Rona repeated in surprise.
    â€˜You know him?’
    â€˜Not personally, but I’ve heard my husband speak of him.’
    â€˜Of course – Max Allerdyce. I was forgetting. Did he ever meet Elspeth?’
    Rona shook her head. ‘Unfortunately not.’ She paused. ‘Who else was at that family dinner?’
    â€˜My parents, as I said; my brother and his wife; Gillian, of course, and Toby, our son. The whole family, in fact.’
    â€˜And there’s been no contact since?’
    Naomi’s eyes dropped. ‘Actually, there’s something I need to tell you.’ She hesitated, her hands twisting in her lap. ‘Everything I’ve said so far is right: she was expected at the dinner, she didn’t come, and we were all very worried. The next day, we reported it to the police, but to our amazement they weren’t interested, maintaining she’d every right to disappear if she wanted to. And without their authorization, her bank refused to tell us whether or not she was still withdrawing money, using her credit card, and so on.’
    Naomi paused to refill their coffee cups. ‘So it was left to us, and we set about organizing searches, persuading the press to run the story, and so on.’ She sighed. ‘But it was a nine days’ wonder; when there were no developments, everyone lost interest. Artists,’ she added bitterly, ‘don’t have the widespread appeal of pop stars.’
    â€˜So then what happened?’ Rona pressed.
    Naomi looked up, steeling herself. ‘Toby, our son, came to us one evening, very red in the face and close to tears, saying he had a confession to make. The long and the short of it was that during the party the night before the birthday dinner, he’d deleted a message from the answer phone. I don’t know about you, but in our house messages build up and are never cleared, and you have to wade through a whole lot of what you’ve already dealt with before coming to anything new. So we’d recently introduced a policy of deleting a message as soon as it had been played.
    â€˜Well, as I said, the phone went in the middle of the party, he answered it – as it happened, a wrong number – and saw the red light flashing. And when he heard Elspeth begin to speak, he thought it was the message she’d left earlier in the week, so he deleted it, went back to the party, and never gave it a second thought, even when she failed to show up the next day. Fifteen-year-old boys, I’m afraid, aren’t the most reliable of mortals. And by the time he did remember, we were all running round in circles, the story had appeared in the press, and basically he’d been too scared to come forward till his conscience got the better of him.
    â€˜But he remembered that as he pressed the delete button, he heard her say, “I want you to tell everyone, while you’re all together, that I’m going—” And that was it. Well, we were frantic, as you can imagine. Elspeth obviously thought we all knew what she was planning, but we’d no idea where she was or how long she’d be away, and to add to our worries, her mobile account had been closed the day after she left. There was absolutely no way to contact her.
    â€˜After a lot of discussion, to spare Toby’s blushes, and also, admittedly, because we’d look foolish, we decided not to make it public, but just let the story die down. No one seemed very interested, anyway.’
    â€˜But surely you’ve heard from her since?’
    â€˜That’s just it! We expected her back in a week or two, or at least